Hungarian

Hungarian (Magyar) is a member of the Uralic language family. It is the largest of the Uralic languages in terms of the number of speakers and the only one spoken in Central Europe. Its closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, minority languages of Russia, spoken 2,000 miles away, east of the Ural mountains in northwestern Siberia. It is estimated that Hungarian has been separated from Khanty and Mansi for about 2,500-3,000 years.

Linguists believe that the ancestors of modern Hungarians first migrated westward from the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains into the steppes of southern Russia in the 4th-6th centuries, and eventually moved further westward into the Danube basin west of the Carpathian Mountains in the 9th century. Over the centuries, the Hungarians have become assimilated into the surrounding European cultures. Only their language testifies to their origin in Asia.

Status

Hungarian is spoken by 9,840,000 people in Hungary. It is the country’s official language used in education and government administration. It is one of the official languages of the European Union. There are sizable populations of Hungarian speakers in Romania, the Czech and Slovak Republics, the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Israel, and the U.S. Smaller pockets of Hungarian speakers live in Canada, Slovenia, and Austria. The total number of speakers of Hungarian worldwide is 12,605,590 (Ethnologue).

Dialects

Standard Hungarian is based on the variety spoken in the capital of Budapest. Although use of the standard dialect is enforced, Hungarian has a number of urban and rural dialects. Ethnologue identifies the following dialects of Hungarian:

Central Transdanubian

North-eastern Hungarian

Palóc

Southern Great Plains

Southern Transdanubian

Tisza–Körös

Western Transdanubian

Oberwart spoken in Austria

Csángó spoken in Rumania

Speakers of standard Hungarian have difficulty understanding the Oberwart dialect spoken in Austria and the Csángó dialect spoken in Rumania.

Structure

The Hungarian sound system is rich in both vowels and consonants.
VowelsHungarian has 14-15 vowels. There are 7 or 8 short vowels. In the table below, long vowels are marked by a macron over the vowel. Seven of the short vowels have long counterparts which are represented in writing with an acute accent í, é, ú, ó, á, õ, ű. One of the salient characteristics of Hungarian is vowel harmony which means that, with a few exceptions, stems with front vowels can be followed by only by suffixes containing front vowels, while stems with back vowels can only be followed by suffixes that contain back vowels.

/tʲ/, /dʲ/, /kʲ/, /nʲ/ = palatalized consonants pronounced with the blade of the tongue coming in contact with the hard palate

/ʃ/ = sh in shop

/ʒ/ = s in vision

/tʃ/ = ch in chap

/dʒ/ = j in job

/cç, ɟʝ/ have no equivalents in English

/ɲ / = first n in canyon

/ŋ/ = ng in song

/j/ = y in yet

Grammar

Like other Uralic languages, Hungarian features a combination of agglutinative and fusional elements. In an agglutinative language, grammatical suffixes are added to stems in a prescribed sequence, with each suffix representing one grammatical function. In a fusional (inflecting) language, several grammatical functions are represented by one suffix.

The person/number suffix represents the person/number of the subject and the person of the object.

Word order
The normal word order in Hungarian is Subject-Verb-Object. . At the same time, word order is determined by topic and comment. Topic is the part of the sentence that is known, while comment is the new information that is being added about the topic. In Hungarian sentences, topic comes first. A certain amount of flexibility allows speakers to express emphasis.

Vocabulary

The basic vocabulary of Hungarian reflects its Uralic origin. The language has also borrowed a large number of words from other languages. Some of the earliest borrowings came from Iranian and Turkic languages during the Hungarian migrations. Later borrowings from German, Italian, French, Slavic languages, and English entered the language after the Hungarians settled in Europe.köszönömBelow are some common phrases in Hungarian.

Writing

Much of early Hungarian history was recorded in runic writings carved into stone, clay, leather and wood. When Saint Stephen, First Christian King of Hungary, converted the Magyar people to Catholicism, he ordered all runic writings to be destroyed. As a result, very few of them have survived.

Hungarian is written with the Latin alphabet. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several additional letters. These include vowels with acute accents á, é, í, ó, ú which represent long vowels, the diaereses ö and ü, and their long counterparts ő and ű. The alphabet also uses a number of digraphs and trigraphs. The letters q, w, x and y are used only in foreign names and loanwords.

a

á

b

c

cs

d

dz

dzs

e

é

f

g

gy

h

I

í

j

k

l

ly

m

n

ny

o

ó

ö

ő

p

r

s

sz

t

ty

u

ú

ü

ű

v

z

zs

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights in Hungarian.

Hungarian is not Indo-European. The fact that it is being used in counties surronding Hungary is purly based on HISTORY. After WW1, the peace treaty that had to be signed by the countries who participated in the war. A book that I onw will help you understand.

“One of the mistakes of the nationalities (under Astro-Hungarian rule) was their greed – they cut off huge ‘chunks’ from the country as soon as they had the chance. Although it’s true that the Hungarians have always been the minority throughout the recent centuies of the country’s history, still the various nationalities exaggerated their territorial claims of their individual states in 1918. This wasn’t good for anyone, since the more Hungarian territories they took away from Hungary, the more Hungarian nationals they got, which became a source of lasting problems. The powers-that-be made secret pacts with the Czechs, Slovakians, Serbs, Croats, Romanians ect. during WW1. This means that the Trianon treaty, named for the Trianon palace near Paris – the location of the discussions – didn’t start in 1920, they just ratified what they couldn’t change then. Unfortunatley, they newly created nations used deception, false cartographic and economic statistics to gian as much as they could. They disregarded the opinion of the Hungarians, since they were defeated and blamed for causing the war in the first place. While Germany lost only 10% of its territory, Hungary’s territory shrank from 325 thousand square kilometers to 93 thousand square kilometers and its population dropped from 21 million to 8 million (most of whome weren’t Hugarian). Over 3 million Hungarians were struck beyond the borders and those who chose to move back to Hungary lost all of their property and never recieved any compensation. The Hungarians were even forced to pay large amounts of military compensation. Countries that didn’t even exist during the WW1 were declared winners of the war, recieving rights and benefits appropriate to the victors. Trianon defined Hungarian foreign policy in the inter-war period. Thus, to a certian extent, WW1 began in 1914 by the seeds the victorius countries planted in the Trianon, which ‘blooomed’ in the 1930s. This is the reason why Hungary became Hitler’s ally, participating, and losing the war. Thus the Trianon led to 45 years of communist oppression as well.”

Kovács Brigi says few people say Szervusz but I have heard it said to me, more than once, and I’m surprised she didn’t mention that “hello” can also mean goodbye in Hungarian e.g. on the phone.

I’m an Irish speaker of the language (a rare breed indeed). My party pieces on what Hungarian is like include explaining the words they have for things like cheese (sajt) and trees (fák), so that “a fákon sajt”, which means ‘cheese on the trees’ (grammatically, if not idiomatically), sounds like pure swearing in English.

Then there is the, eh, poetic appraisal of the language by the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (1911-95):

“Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura… words of nectar and cyanide.”

Bementem a magyar nyelvbe, mint folyóba, és féltem, hogy fulladnám benne, de végül feljöttem ujra, a bűvös tudással. (‘I went into the Hungarian language like into a river and I feared I would drown in it but eventually I came up again, with the magical knowledge’).

L.B.
April 1, 2015

Nice article, however let me add a few things:
Á and É are not A and E pronounced longer. Actually they are different sounds. E sounds like in EN ‘bed’ while É is more or less similar to what A stands for in ‘day’. Á is like how the vowel starts in ‘wow’, while A is somewhere in between Á and O (as in’long’). Or at least something like those. Technically, all four can be pronounced both long and short, however in standard speech their length corresponds to the macron on the letter.
@Brigi Kovács – ‘man’ can indeed correspond to ’ember’, partially because HU uses this general noun (indeed meaning human/person) more often. Like, say, “we were looking for this man five years ago” can be traslated as “ezt az embert kerestük öt évvel ezelőtt” (as well as ‘ezt a férfit…’ but that sounds slightly unnatural in Hungarian).

Another comment on Word Order: as an agglutinating language, word order is not bound strictly in Hungarian, therefore it can be used to express emphasis or other subtleties. This is quite a fun part of our language so I thought it is worth adding.

Hungarian is related to Finnish (and Estonian) language. It gets very confusing to read through the errors and corrections, using examples of words adopted from English and other languages, and not real Hungarian words. There are also dialects, depending on the country and region and the mother tongue of the speaker, however, those are easy to understand once you know the language.

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